How Can YUSU Better Represent You?

By Millie Beach (Union President)

This year at YUSU we’re making some big changes to the way you can influence Union policy. It’s incredibly important to us that we're as representative as possible of our members; we want to work with you to build a system that’s more responsive and allows you to have a clear say in how we move forward. The democratic review will see us re-evaluating our current policy process, as part of wider work to ensure that our governing framework is fit for purpose, and we're looking to engage with you all in a number of ways;

We're running focus groups with key student groups across the next few weeks (so keep an eye on your inboxes for invites!), including the PTOs, Colleges, Academic Reps, LibWelf Network and Societies.

When we've pulled together the data, we'll be announcing initial results towards the end of this term at an Officer Question Time to give you a chance to learn more about our findings, discover what they mean for our democratic procedures and offer further input to our proposals.

The final decision on how we move forward will be taken by the entire student body in a referendum in Term 2 - with much more information to come on that at the Officer Question Time and via a dedicated mini-site.

This does mean that in the short term our staff will be focused on this consultation work, and as a result any non-time-sensitive policy Ideas will be looked at in Term 2.

This is a really exciting opportunity for us to hear how you want to be represented, how decisions should be made and what you want your union to stand for.